An ode to Scotty Morrison's spontaneous Te Karere sign-offs
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My daughter and I have a daily ritual. Each afternoon when she comes home from school, we sit down together to watch Deal or No Deal Australia on TVNZ1. Hosted by the indefatigably cheery Grant Denyer, Deal or No Deal is a ridiculous game of luck that requires absolutely no skill or expertise – yet we watch it with a passion matched only by the Australians on our screen whose entire future rests on shouting out random numbers in public. We groan in sympathy when they inevitably lose $100,000, and we cheer when they win just enough to take their dying grandad up in a hot air balloon.
I also love watching Deal or No Deal because of what comes before it: Te Karere. More specifically, I love watching Te Karere to see just how newsreader Scotty Morrison will end the show. Every afternoon at the end of the reo Māori news bulletin, Morrison cuts to tomorrow's weather forecast and concludes with a hearty ' turou parea, turou Hawaiki '. Then, as the camera slowly pulls back from the news desk, my eyes are glued to see what he will do next.
Often, it's a gesture so subtle you could almost miss it. Morrison might unleash his speedy fingers onto the keyboard in front of him, all ten fingers moving with such ferocity that whatever important message he's writing can only contain one word: sa;dlfjkas;ldfjas;ldjkf. On other days, Morrison's surprise end-of-news move is more obvious: a shimmy in his swivel chair to Shane Walker's 'Coasty Girl', a jovial pat of his puku, a smooth worm-like arm wave, some jazzy finger points in time with the music.
Sometimes, Te Karere ends before Morrison has a chance to do anything. These days are a crime against television, leaving me more disappointed than an Australian octogenarian who said 'no deal' to the banker's top offer of $17,400 only to discover she had 50 cents in her suitcase all along.
It may only be a few seconds of magic, but Morrison's unpredictable sign-offs are a rare, joyful moment of spontaneity and personality in my TV day. Those impromptu finger points and surprise shoulder shimmies are a quiet rebellion against the expected order of things, and a delicious secret signal to the loyal audience watching at home.
We've lost a lot of this spontaneity with the cancellation of shows like AM and The Project, where anything could happen on live TV. Even Breakfast has calmed down since the glory days when Matty McLean dressed up as a dinosaur and John Campbell rode a train, just because they could. It's a great thing that Herald Now started last week, a new live breakfast show that reaches out to viewers in the moment and reminds us of television's power to connect with people (while also making us wonder what the heck is going on in the background).
I hope Scotty Morrison never stops doing these Te Karere farewells. In fact, I hope they get bigger and better (is a cartwheel too much to ask?). In a world where our streaming services are filled with prerecorded international content that has little connection to Aotearoa in the here and now, there's something wonderful in remembering that live broadcast TV can still be appointment viewing – arm worms and all.
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"Artists are just the most incredible people. They truly are." Being able to watch and film Ngahina Hohia installing her Paopao Ki tua o Rangi (2009) mixed-media installation using poi, light and sound, drawing on her own whakapapa and the story of Parihaka, over a few days was "mind blowing". It is a piece that has been shown around the world. "It's so beautiful. Again as a viewer you go in and you don't know how many days she spent putting it all together." Then she got to be in Australia when Reuben Paterson saw the glass waka he had designed in real life for the first time. Due to Covid he had supervised its construction via the internet. "It was great to capture him there. I would have been freaking out if that was my piece and it's so incredible when you see it going." But it also gave her a new appreciation for what galleries and their staff do to make exhibitions come to life for the public from driving across the country to pick up valuable and fragile works to conserving pieces so they can can continue to be seen for years to come. "I didn't realise how many people even worked at the gallery, or what all their roles were. Everyone from the registration team, were just such lovely people who take such incredible care, meticulous care. There is just so much that goes on behind the scenes." Sad that the show came down in 2021 six months after opening and that it did not go on to travel internationally, Wistanley took time to decide whether or not to finish the documentary. "I really just didn't want to put out a piece that, oh, the show opened. And yet again, it smashed all the records for visitors and things like that. It did all those things. But it didn't do some other really fundamental things, which sat with me for some time." Two years ago she began working on the piece again, trawling through the hundreds of hours of material to piece together the final story. "I think for them, it's a great archive. I just really wanted to kind of celebrate really what goes on. And it probably turned into something slightly different in the end." TO SEE TOITŪ: Visual Sovereignty , Rialto Cinema, Dunedin, August 24, 3.45pm. Q and A by director Chelsea Winstanley.
